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Memoir / Journalism / Russia

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Lying Together My Russian Affair Jennifer Beth Cohen Terrace Books "Riveting. The love story is wistful, funny, and wise, woven into a moment in history, also seen with a candid and revealing eye. This is an original-a fresh voice, a great read, a memorable coming of age story."—Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice "Cohen writes fearlessly about love, betrayal, and self-discovery. . . . Anyone who has fallen for the wrong person, or sought adventure, will be captivated by this tale of a young woman learning to become herself amid the swirls and intrigues of Moscow."—Michele Mitchell, author of The Latest Bombshell In January 1998, while the rest of her newsroom is chasing the Monica Lewinsky story, television journalist Jennifer Cohen gets a lead that takes her out of covering that scandal and deep into another one—the trafficking of sex slaves from the former Soviet Union into the United States. Knowing that the college crush she never quite forgot works for a St. Petersburg newspaper, she hires him to help out. Much to their surprise, they fall madly in love over thousands of miles of telephone line. Cohen finds herself engaged to marry a man she barely knows and on a plane to Russia. No one could have predicted the total collapse that followed—of the Russian economy, of her fiancé's sobriety, of Cohen's mental health and physical safety, and of her professional aspirations. Cohen's vivid descriptions of her life in anything-goes Moscow—bribing government officials, meeting pimps in back alleys for interviews—are a colorful counterpart to the despair and loneliness that replaces the love between Cohen and her fiancé. Their battles with prescription drugs, alcoholic rages, and physical abuse are recounted, offering a poignant and unvarnished look at a complicated relationship in a complicated land. "The officers of St. Petersburg's anticorruption task force were ridiculously underpaid, if they were paid at all. To make ends meet, or even overlap, some guys developed the habit of confiscating items from crime scenes. Evidence. . . . The short story is that, instead of a Tiffany box, my ring came wrapped in a tiny Ziploc bag, the kind the dealers use when selling pot or crack. It had slipped quite easily off the whore's rigid finger and onto my shaky one."—excerpt from Lying Together Jennifer Beth Cohen is an award-winning producer for CBS News/The Early Show and a writer based in New York City and Washington, D.C. She has been a news producer, documentary filmmaker, and a freelance journalist, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, Maxim, and Allure. This is her first book. For more information from Jennifer Cohen's own Web site, click on www.lying together.com Or contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu Reviews "It is the late 1990s, and the Soviet Union has dissolved. With the good timing you would expect of a news producer, Cohen covers Russia as it adjusts to the breakup. She has loftier ambitions than her New York City job and wants to change her single status as well. She thus reconnects with Kevin, a fellow Russian-language enthusiast she always hankered after in college. Now a journalist in Russia, he alerts her to rumors of sex trafficking between Russia and New York City. Initially lured by Kevin's rawness and Russia's seeming lawlessness, which she convincingly conveys, Cohen comes to realize that her ideas about living in Russia, advancing her career there, and marrying Kevin are more fantasy than reality. Using her journalistic skills, she ably captures readers' interest in the opening paragraph of each chapter, then continues to flesh out her story. Though she covers less than a year, this intense period in her life is so colorfully described that it feels as if much more time has elapsed. Recommended for public libraries."—Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Library Journal "Cohen's language remains as journalistic at the end as it was at the beginning, but when she's describing the Dostoyevskian decline of her romance, her tale becomes simply riveting. Which raises a curious question: are the great Russian writers really novelists? Or might they just be gifted journalists, uncannily skilled at recording the irrational realities of their perverse land?"—The New York Times Book Review "[A] fascinatingly moving memoir ... an engagingly intimate voice... The story of their ill-fated relationship is told against a backdrop of incredible political upheaval and peppered with a cast of characters as extraordinary as those in the court of Versailles."—The Boston Globe "Business meets sex meets pleasure meets danger meets their mutual love of the journalistic hunt. It's a heady cocktail.... a quick, juicy read. All in all, she offers an interesting, if dark, account of the strange and dangerous places intemperate passions can lead us." —The San Francisco Chronicle

September 2004 LC: 2004005255 PN 214 pp. 6 x 9 ISBN 0-299-20100-7 Cloth $22.95 t To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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